Malvina Cornell Hoffman 

(1885-1966)

 

Recognized as an important American sculptor, Malvina Hoffman was born in New York City, and was a portrait sculptor of pieces that expressed the fluid movement of dancers and lofty human values.  She became especially noted for her hall-of-fame portraits including Paderewski, Pavlova, Wendell Wilkie and Katharine Cornell. 

 

Many of her pieces she carved in stone, and some of them were enormous in scale including war monuments. 

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Her masterpiece is considered to be The Races of Man, done in 1933, commissioned by the Marshall Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.  It had one-hundred five separate pieces, cast in bronze, depicting people from diverse cultures.

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She studied with Herbert Adams and Gutzon Borglum in New York and in Paris in 1910 with Auguste Rodin from whom she learned naturalism and whose doorstep

she sat on until he agreed to see her.  In Paris, she associated with numerous leading intellectuals including Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse, and Anna Pavlova,

and her bronze sculptures of Pavlova, Russian ballet star, won her much attention

and many commissions.

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Source:  Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Artists

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